A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.

Thursday, 8 January 2015

The wars must go on...

How was it when you planned the first gulf war and the second and the
war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya? Did you sit in your bunkers
and convince yourselves that these were wars which would only be
fought where you were dropping bombs? Did you imagine that every time
an unarmed civilian died that this would be forgotten? Did you imagine
that every act of killing you took, was to defend us? Did anyone in the
bunker hold up his hand and say, 'Perhaps I should just raise the possibility
that people in the world who have links to the places we are bombing
will think that they can join the war by fighting it in our countries over here…'
Was he shouted down? Was he told that he was a wishy-washy liberal,
someone soft on multiculturalism, a relativist, a false witness, or what?
Was he told that he was a fool and didn't understand that these wars are
wars of known consequences and all these consequences are good ones:
peace, democracy, liberal values? These are wars to end wars. And he,
the foolish man, couldn't see that these were wars which would advance
civilisation. And if at any point in the future anyone were to raise the
possibility that attacks might be made on liberal western countries in
response to these wars, the foolish man would be told that there was no
linkage, no unforeseen consequences. The war must go on. The wars
must go on. And on. Civilisation is just round the corner. One last push.
One last drone. One last bomb. One last invasion. C'mon!